My dreams were certainly bigger than my basement turned out to be. Even though I lived there all my life as a tenant and knew the size of the space there, I'd often design layouts that occupied almost all of it, especially after my landlord (coincidentally related via marriage) announced an intent to move back to his childhood hometown once retired. We were first in line to buy them out, and did just that in 2005.
The thing I didn't factor in was needing to share that space with the family (whoops!). The other thing was the advancing age of my parents/co-owners, which meant once we made the initial round of home-improvements, the willingness to engage in projects such as "clearing out unused or poorly stored stuff" would weaken. So now the basement is so full of "stuff" that it's more like a maze, and even though I built a (freestanding) shelf wide enough for two tracks to encircle the largest space, it's five feet up in the air (to clear an upright freezer) and I have yet to build the lift-out bridges to pass over the access walkway and two doorways interrupting its path. It's just discouraging to go down there and look at it, knowing there likely won't be room for much more than the two-track loop.
That leaves the "test track" around my living room. Until I briefly needed the open space to accommodate a houseguest (there's a sofa-bed in there) and had to pile all the train boxes in a corner between the storage shelves making almost a quarter of the track inaccessible. After that situation passed I resolved to get one more storage unit to place in the basement and did that--only to find that there wasn't even enough room to assemble the thing let alone park it next to the two that were already standing there back-to back. So, my test-track activities stagnated. It's been more than a year since I last ran anything there. (yeah, I said I'd join the NJ Hirailers--they're as short as a 30 minute drive away with light traffic--but I'm still a newbie behind the wheel, and the logistics of swapping the family's two cars around just for a day wasn't that appealing)
But a light may have appeared at the end of this tunnel. Recently I identified a corner in the dining room where the unit could go. I don't know why I didn't use the space before (I'm the sole occupant of my apartment in the two-family, so there's no one to object). I managed to shove a (heavy yet structurally questionable) computer cabinet over enough to clear the shelving unit (once I move the devices managing my home network), and the excess can go there, restoring access to the test track, and neatening things up enough to resume running trains, filming test-train activity, posting said video to YouTube (an activity that got me my first thousand subscribers) and perhaps more importantly, allowing me to resume photographing and entering these items in my inventory, so that one day...
...
...
...I'll actually know how many pieces I have 
---PCJ
